They say that Ipswich no longer has a red-light district.

Gone are the short-skirted silhouettes that used to haunt Handford Road and Sir Alf Ramsey Way. Cars have stopped cruising the corners of West End Road and are seldom seen parking and passing through the shadows around the football ground.

As Steve Wright is sentenced for robbing five young women of the chance to turn their lives around, it appears that his killing spree has switched off the red light for good.

Until the discovery of the first body there was a known hardcore of about 28 women working regularly in the area; now there are only two or three.

Fourteen months on, the town’s prostitution problem appears to have been downgraded to a level that support workers now like to call “amber”.

Steph is one of 19 former street workers who are trying to overcome the drug addiction that pushed them on to the lowest rung of the sex industry in the first place.

“Once I lost friends, I thought, ‘F*** that’,” she told The Times. “In the end, it was just not worth it. And I wanted to change my life anyway.” The mother of two knew four of the dead girls and counted two as close friends. They took drugs together, lived in crack houses together, and sold sex together. She was the last person to see Annette Nicholls, and the only other girl out working with her that night.

The murders came as a wake-up call. And the subsequent rush of support - from the police, drug charities and residents – gave her the exit route that she had been looking for.

After being ignored by the authorities for years, a strong police presence and increased attention to kerbcrawling made business difficult and clients less forthcoming. “Before, you would get young guys throwing things at you, shouting insults. I don’t think people thought of us as humans,” said Steph. “But afterwards, I’d get guys stopping their cars and saying, ‘There’s some money. Just go home’. Nobody had ever done that before.”

Steph looks much younger than her 30 years. She talks cheerily of putting on weight and gaining access to her son, 14, and daughter, 7, who she now sees every Saturday.

She no longer picks up clients every night by the Jolly Sailor but admits to working from home a couple of times a week. She describes her present heroin use as “occasional”. The difference now, Steph insists, is that she no longer relies on “handjob” money to pay the rent or the £30 per punter to support her drugs habit. “When I think of how I’m doing now, compared to how I was doing a year ago, I’m amazed I’m even here,” she said. “Obviously, I’m not glad it happened. But I’m glad help was eventually there.”

The Times met Steph at the docklands drop-in centre run by the Iceni Project, a local drugs charity that can claim much of the credit in weaning these women into recovery. Some £27,000 – donated by a national charity, church groups and a private individual after the killings – enabled the project to help the girls to find accommodation and to cover their basic living expenses. While the project helped the girls to tackle their drug addictions, Suffolk police have tackled demand over the past year, arresting 131 kerbcrawlers and issuing “acceptable behaviour contracts” to another 125 men. Only two have broken the agreement so far.

A controversial “naming and shaming” campaign by the Evening Star newspaper in Ipswich also appeared to make the prospective punter think twice. The outreach work by two women PCs, Janet Humphreys and Gemma Fisher, is, after some initial hostility, restoring trust between police and prostitutes. “The police have been very vigilant since then,” said one London Road resident who asked not to be named.

The murders have affected a wider area, too. Before the tragedy that divided her professional life into “before” and “after”, Kimberley, 27, a private escort based in Essex, would see between four and six clients every working day. She would go on “out-calls”, meeting men who saw her adverts online in hotels or at their houses. The murders did not encourage her to give up the good income she earned from “the industry” nor to remove herself completely from those inside it, whom she refers to, almost affectionately, as “the girls”, “the punters” and the subgroup of “wackjobs”. She accepts the latter as occupational hazards who will never disappear.

However, it did make her re-examine the way that she was working. As a result she now sells sex from the relative safety of the spare room of her semi-detached home in Hornchurch, Essex. Private escorts “did seem to tighten up their security, but almost every single girl I know soon went back,” she says. Now the escorts continue to warn each other of suspicious or violent clients by posting alerts on websites such as Punternet. com. “I get the live feeds on my BlackBerry,” she said.

The national exposure did cast a short-term chill on business. Kimberley went from earning £1,000-£1,500 in a good week, to £500. But, after a break working in the IT department of a financial company, the steady income lured her back.

The red-light district may be gone. But sex is still for sale in Ipswich.

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